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DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY 



CITY OP NEW-YORK, 



DECEMBER 22, 1851 



BY GEORGE S. HILLARD 



PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY. 






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NEW-YORK : 

GEORGK P. NESBITT AND CO.. PRINTERS. 



1852. 



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DISCOURSE. 



Man is a being of " large discourse, looking before 
and after." From this power of living in the past and 
the future, his essential grandeur and dignity are derived. 
The life of the individual is but a momentary spark ; but 
the life of liumanity is a luminous web, flowing from the 
bosopa of God, into which the hours of every day are 
woveii. Through memory and hope, we are born to a 
great inheritance of records and promises ; and poor in- 
deed is the life which feeds only on the meagre harvest of 
the present. It is a proud privilege to be able to break 
away from this " bank and shoal of time," to seek what 
shall be in what has been, to turn experience into pro- 
phecy, and, with retrospective glance, discern in the mir- 
ror of the Past the airy shapes of the unborn Future. 

The origin of our country lies in the open daylight of 
history. We cannot go back to that morning twilight of 
tradition, from which poetry draws so many of its themes 
and so much of its inspiration. Such forms as Arthur 
and the Cid, in whom the real and the fanciful meet and 
blend, like the mountain and the cloud upon the distant 
horizon, have no place upon our soil. The simple dig- 
nity of men like Carver, and Brewster, and Winthrop, 
can borrow no attractions from the hues of romance. If 



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we lose something, so far as imagination is concerned, by 
the nearness and distinctness of the settlement of the 
country, we gain much upon the side of truth, in the 
moral dignity which was stamped upon the enterprise, in 
the exalted motives which led to it, and in those high 
qualities of mind and character by which its success was 
confirmed. If our early history does not furnish those 
picturesque contrasts, those wild struggles, those lawless 
manners, and those genial traits of homely nature, which, 
lying in the idealizing light of distance, become the 
sources from which poetry draws its ever new materials, 
it is a sufficient compensation to a manly spirit, to be able 
to say that the institutions of New England were founded 
in religious faith ; that their progress was assured by the 
animating principle of civil liberty ; that they were con- 
secrated by a deep-seated respect for law, and enforced by 
lives of spotless purity. Other nations can trace back the 
beginnings of their social and civil state to earlier periods, 
through a longer succession of generations ; but who can 
find them lying in higher sources than religion, liberty, 
and law 1 

This day is the birthday of a great people. It is 
dedicated to the Past and the Future. It is rescued from 
the grasp of common life, and set apart for serener con- 
templations and finer visions. The importunate and cla- 
morous present is laid asleep. Our thoughts are disen- 
gaged from the splendid results of civilization and cul- 
tivation which lie about us. The irresistible power 
with which the vast interests and vivid excitements of a 
great city seize upon and subdue the spirit of man, is, for 



the moment, paralyzed. Your croTfded warehouses; your 
stately mansions ; your streets, through which such tides 
of life rush and foam ; your noble rivers, shadowed by so 
many sails, and furrowed by so many keels, are shut out 
from the eye of the mind. Far other scenes unfold them- 
selves to its gaze. We see a desolate coast, white with 
the snows, and swept with the storms of winter. We 
see a solitary vessel, weather-stained and tempest-shat- 
tered. We see a band of men, women and children, shi- 
vering with cold, suffering from the effects of a long and 
rough voyage, and some already touched with mortal 
sickness — but all animated with the same expression of 
fortitude and faith, which gives a nobler dignity to the 
brow of manhood, a purer light to the eye of woman^ and 
breathes a thoughtful air over the face of childhood itself. 
Behind them is the sea, before them is the forest, and 
above them is the sky. Danger, and solitude, and famine, 
and winter, are the grim shapes that welcome them to 
their unknown home. There are neither friendly faces, 
nor cordial greetings, nor warm embraces, nor food, nor 
shelter, in the howling wilderness before them. They 
are alone with their God. 

The experiences by which these men and women have 
been ripened for the work which lies before them, em- 
brace a large segment of all that circle of action and suf- 
fering by which humanity is trained and tempered. Few 
of the sorrows which try the firmness of man, or the love 
of woman, have been wanting in their lives. They have 
felt the wrath of enemies, the coldness of friends, the 
sharpness of persecution, and the dreary heart-ache of 



exile. Poverty and a low estate have hardly been ac- 
counted among their chief burdens. The necessities of 
their position have called forth whatever there was in 
them of fortitude, circumspection, vigilance, and pru- 
dence. Difficulties have obstructed their path, so numer- 
ous and so great, that nothing but the constant exercise 
of sagacity and self-command could have overcome them. 
Their life has been a long warfare against the oppression 
of power from without, and the promptings of what 
seemed weakness from within. And as they have had 
great sorrows, so they have had great satisfactions. The 
pressure of persecution has bound their hearts together 
by a depth and fullness of sympathy such as can never 
grow in the air of happiness and prosperity. Domestic 
love — chaste, pure and warm — has soothed and sustained 
them, and the strong man, Avhen ready to faint, has been 
upheld by the unconquerable faith and undying truth 
which animate and ti'ansfigure the feeble frame of woman. 
And, above all, they have been admitted to a closer walk 
with God than has been vouchsafed to men of higher 
place, more endowed with the goods of this world, more 
rich in carnal gifts and eye-attracting graces. He has 
bowed His heavens, and, passing by the princes and no- 
bles of the earth, has spoken with them as friend speaks 
with friend. With thpm He has made a covenant, and 
they are the living ark to whose keeping His law is in- 
trusted. In the watches of the night, in solitary wilder- 
nesses, upon the lonely ocean, have they heard His awful 
voice. Rapturous dreams, resplendent visions, celestial 
revelations have overshone their souls, and so erected 



aud exalted their spirits, that the strong ones of the earth 
have been as dead men beneath their feet. 

The Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth — Englishmen by 
birth — belonged to that remarkable body of men, the 
Puritans, who, in the period between the Reformation 
and the Revolution of Sixteen hundred and eighty-eight, 
Avrought such mighty works in Church and State, and 
had so large a hand in opening those channels in which the 
mind of England was ever after to run. I need hardly 
say that the name of Puritan leads us into a wide field of 
controversy, involving vital and enduring principles, both 
political and religious, in which every reflecting man, 
who speaks the speech of England, is led to take one side 
or the other, according to his temperament and turn of 
mind. But though all the issues in this great contest 
are not yet, and never will be settled, yet upon many the 
silent verdict of history has been passed ; and only obsti- 
nate prejudice or clamorous pertinacity will move for a 
rehearing. It is enough for us that the Puritans, as a 
body in English history, long assailed and defended with 
indiscriminate and partisan zeal, have reached a point of 
enlightened comprehension and candid judgment. There 
is a general consent among judicial minds as to their 
energy in action, and their constancy in suflering, as to 
the depth and fervor of their religious convictions and the 
prodigious power of speech, thought, and conduct, inspired 
by them, and especially as to the inestimable services 
which they rendered to the cause of civil liberty. Upon 
this last point the testimony of Hume, considering his 
total want of sympathy with the Puritans in politics, as 



8 

well as religion, may be received as the very best evi- 
dence that could be put into the case. 

Puritanism as an element of struggle in the history of 
England, and Puritanism as a constructive element in the 
formation and development of the institutions of New Eng- 
land, present points both of resemblance and diversity. In 
England, the Puritans were always in an attitude of pro- 
test and resistance. They set their faces against civil and 
ecclesiastical tyranny, against the power of the Bishops and 
the encroachments of the Crown, against the Court of 
High Commission and the Star-Chamber, against Straf- 
ford, and against Laud. They contended for liberty in 
things sacred and liberty in things secular, for liberty in 
prophesying and liberty in debate, for the liberty of the 
congregation and the liberty of the individual. They 
formed the party of progress, and embodied the princi- 
ples of movement and dissent. When a portion of them 
were transplanted to a new world, it "^vas natural and 
probable to suppose that the impulse of resistance com- 
municated at home would have proved a propelling motive 
abroad, that right would have been sought in a point the 
most remote from wrong, and that their sense of the 
abuses of power would have taken the form of impatience 
under necessary restraints. Reasoning from analogy, 
we should have supposed that the soil of New England 
would have been the scene of the wildest experiments in 
government, and that the land would have been like the 
land of Israel in those days when there was no king, and 
every man did that which was right in his own eyes. 
Such would have been the case, had our Puritans been 



the narroAV-minded fanatics which, through ignorance or 
malice, they have sometimes been called. But the event 
was far unlike that which might have been anticipated ; 
and nothing proves more conclusively that their experi- 
ences had not impaired the balanced wisdom of their 
minds, than the fact that these sufferers and exiles in the 
cause of liberty should have shown, from the moment 
they landed upon the soil of Plymouth, so profound a re- 
spect for the principle of law, and should have expressed 
that feeling so decisively in their early legislation. Reve- 
rence for authority, a stern sense of order, the submis- 
sion of the one to the many, a horror of insubordination, 
and faith in elders and magistrates, were leading traits 
in the character of the Pilgrims. Indeed, they pushed 
the principle of law too far, and, in many instances, 
turned against the liberty of the individual that sharp 
edge of legislation, the smart of which they had so often 
felt in their own persons. 

It is easy to praise the Puritan Fathers of New Eng- 
land ; it is not difficult to blame them. We have met here 
to honor, not to praise them ; for to honor is not always 
to praise, and to praise is not always to honor. There 
are two aspects in which every man may be regarded. 
In the one case, we examine his fitness to accomplish 
some end foreign to himself; in the other, we inquire 
into his growth and development with reference to a self- 
contained end. In the one case, we ask, what can he do i 
in the other, what is he '? Viewing these men with refer- 
ence to an ideal standard of humanity, we admit their 
want of symmetry and proportion Some qualities we 



10 



should like to add, and others to take aAvay. Their man- 
ners were severe, and their temper intolerant. While 
sternly breaking away from the seductions of the senses, 
they did not always escape the vices of hypocrisy and 
spiritual pride. They gave an undue importance to 
trifles, and exalted indifferent observances to the dignity 
of symbols. Their legislation was teasing and intrusive 
in its details, and in its spirit darkened by a mistaken 
sense of the perpetual obligation of the Mosaic Code. 
While they shut out from their hearts the refreshment 
that comes from the sense of beauty, they opened the 
door to those fierce and consuming excitements which 
waste the bosoms in which they rage. Their sympathies 
were neither cordial nor expansive, and they would not 
have been a comfortable people for any one, not of their 
own way of thinking, to have dwelt among. But when 
we view them with reference to their fitness for the task 
of colonizing New England, we find them wanting in no 
needful qualities, but, on the contrary, abounding in all. 
We then look upon them as a people raised up by God to 
do a great work, and trained to that high destiny by a 
corresponding discipline. We must admit that, as in- 
struments for accomplishing the end that was set before 
them, they were hardly less than perfect. A religious 
faith less intense, an enthusiasm less exalted, a constancy 
of purpose less firm, a softer fibre of soul, a more flexible 
temper of mind, could never have carried them through 
the dangers and difficulties which lay in the path of their 
enterprise. For this, the highest and strongest of worldly 
motives would have been found wanting. Neither the 



11 

glow of patriotism, nor the love of power, nor the sense 
of honor, nor the passion for gain, could have borne the 
fearful experiences of the first five years of the Plymouth 
colony. These will enable men to dispense with luxuries, 
to submit to privations, and to encounter dangers : but 
when hunger is, day after day, gnawing at their hearts ; 
when Winter is beating upon them with his icy flail ; 
when Death is so busy among them, that the able-bodied 
can do little more than nurse the sick and bury the dead, 
unaided humanity will sink and fall under the burden. 
The support that Avill enable men to bear up under so 
tremendous a pressure, must come from Heaven and not 
from earth. Man must lay hold of the hand of God, 
and, aided by that, lift himself above himself, not 
merely casting aside his trials, but making them pedestals 
of exaltation. And if the elements were so mingled in 
the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, that they had every 
quality requisite for the work appointed unto them, so 
that none was wanting and none Avas excessive, do we not 
see that their previous discipline had been such, as to call 
forth all the powers that were essential, and, at the same 
time, to forbid the growth of those genial graces and 
winning accomplishments, which they are sometimes un- 
thinkingly blamed for not possessing 1 That they were 
not fine gentlemen and elegant scholars, is true ; but how 
could men acquire courtly manners or delicate learning, 
that had never breathed the air of security, had been 
obliged to steal through life with the cry of pursuit ever 
following them upon the wind, had never been bidden 
to good men^s feasts, nor slept on tranquil pillows ? 



12 

Poverty, persecution and exile, form those stern and strong 
virtues which are the protection and defence of commu- 
nities, as the storms of winter blow vigor into the oak 
and the pine, whose rafters are hewn into forts, and 
churches, and houses ; but the softer and gentler graces, 
which embellish a prosperous condition, bloom by the 
side of still waters, and in gardens sheltered from the 
sweeping blast. 

While we acknowledge and lament that spirit of intol- 
erance which darkens the memory of the Puritan Fathers 
of New England, we contend that upon this charge they 
should be tried by the standard of their own age, 
and not by that of ours. We honor men who are in 
advance of their times, but we have no right to blame 
those who are not. Moral truth is progressive as well as 
material. We do not censure the Puritans for having 
been ignorant of vaccination, or the expansive power of 
steam, and, practically, the world knew as little at 
that time of the great principle of toleration. So 
late as 1612, the fires of Smithfield were lighted for 
the burning of a heretic. Even Milton, in that splen- 
did eifusion of generous zeal, so far beyond his age — 
the Speech for the Liberty of unlicensed printing — 
stops short the glowing wheels of his eloquence in mid 
career, and expressly excludes Popery from the arms of 
that wide-embracing toleration which should clasp all 
Protestant sects. That the Puritans, who had fled from 
persecution, should themselves have persecuted, is a 
seeming inconsistency which the laws of the human mind 
easily explain. That the men, who are most prepared 



13 

to suffer martyrdom, are the most inclined to inflict it, is 
no paradox to him who knows the nature of faith and the 
power of zeal. The Puritans, from the beginning, were 
of this stern and uncompromising spirit. In their judg- 
ment, not only were their own views of doctrine and 
church government true, but all others were false. They 
could not live in the pleasant land of their birth, because 
they could not consent to tolerate what they deemed 
error. They had sacrificed everything that makes life 
sweet to the natural man, and fled into the wilderness, in 
order to found a pure church, such as the pure eyes of 
God might look upon with favor, and they felt that they 
had an exclusive right to those spiritual privileges which 
they had bought with so great a price. They had made 
the waste place a garden of the Lord, and they could not 
allow any weeds of heresy to take root in it. What 
equivalent had they to show for all they had renounced, 
and all they had suffered, if they were to encounter here 
the false doctrines and idolatrous practices which had 
made life intolerable to them at home 1 They held their 
own lives as nothing when weighed in the balance against 
the truth ; and if, in defence of the truth, they inflicted 
death, they were equally prepared to meet it, had such 
been the will of God. Our own age has outgrown the 
axe and the fagot ; but is the combination of an earnest 
faith and a tolerant spirit so very common, as to entitle 
us to sit in judgment upon the intolerance of the pasf? 
What we call toleration is commonly only another name 
for indifference. To have deep and fervid convictions in 
religion or politics, and at the same time to respect the 



14 

intellectual rights of those who have come to diflferent 
conclusions, is still the rarest and finest of unions. 

That the Pilgrim Fathers, whose landing upon the shore 
of Plymouth we are this day commemorating, were men of 
an eminently religious spirit, and that the motives which 
moved them to that enterprise were mainly of a religious 
origin, can be denied by no candid mind who examines 
the evidence contained in their own recorded statements, 
written with perfect simplicity, and at a time and under 
circumstances which make it impossible that they should 
have had any purpose of concealment or deception. In 
their view, the ties which bound them to God were far 
more important than those which bound them to any 
earthly object. The fervor of their zeal was in propor- 
tion to the depth and sincerity of their faith. They were 
penetrated with the most vivid sense of the real existence 
of those things that are spiritually discerned. The ter- 
rors and promises of the unseen world were ever darken- 
ing and brightening their path. The smiles and frowns 
of God were to them as visible, as those which a child 
sees upon the face of an earthly parent. Their daily life 
revolved upon the poles of spiritual truth. 

A religious spirit is not to be confounded with a re- 
ligious creed. It is quite possible for a man to assent 
sincerely to certain articles of religious faith, and yet 
live a worldly and irreligious life. Belief is an act of the 
mind ; but a religious spirit is a state of the moral affec- 
tions. It implies the constant guidance and restraint of 
motives flowing from religious convictions. It rests upon 
the ideas of the continued existence of the soul, a future 



15 

state, and a pei'sonal God, against whose moral purity 
sin is an offence. Religious opinions are modified by the 
progress Avhich the mind makes in secular knowledge and 
general intelligence. Religious truth is a flowing stream, 
and not a stagnant pool, and God's revelations are not, 
like stars, best discerned in the night of ignorance and 
credulity. The admirable Robinson, in his farewell ser- 
mon, told his people, in words which are as true this day 
as when they were spoken, that " he was very confident 
the Lord had more truth yet to break out of his holy 
word." But the spirit of religion is ever essentially the 
same, just as we see the true spirit of scientific inquiry, 
alike in Roger Bacon, groping in the twilight of knowledge, 
and in Humboldt, walking in its noon-day blaze. That 
the Pilgrims were men of a profoundly religious spirit, is 
a fact quite irrespective of the wisdom or expediency of 
the particular acts and forms in which that spirit was 
expressed. History records no body of men, whose lives 
were more shaped and guided by the relations which exist 
between God and the human soul. It is no figure of 
speech, but a literal truth, to say, that the glory of God 
was the chief end of their existence, and that they found 
perfect freedom in entire submission to His law. The 
power which this principle of faith inspired, the constancy 
of purpose which it gave, the firm temper of soul which 
it infused, can never be told by vague rhetoric or im- 
passioned declamation, but can only be felt by those who 
will read the record of the sufferings and privations of 
their early years, made at the time, and on the spot, as 
simply as if it had been the log-book of a coasting voy- 



16 

age. It tamed the rage of hunger, it softened the rigor 
of cold, it broke the sting of death. It was a cordial to 
the sick, a shield to the timid, a hope to the desponding, 
a staff to the feeble. 

While "we acknowledge with gratitude the beneficent 
influences of that religious faith which belonged to the 
Pilgrims, as Puritans, we should not forget what we owe 
to those ideas of civil liberty which were their inheritance 
as Englishmen. Though, to borrow their own quaint lan- 
guage, they had become well weaned from the delicate 
milk of their mother country ; yet they had not lost the 
vigor drawn from that strong meat of Saxon freedom, 
which she had given them to eat. They landed upon the 
shore of Plymouth, already instructed in the noble art of 
building up a state. Their brains were not heated with 
wild visions of ideal commonwealths, and they were not 
compelled to read the lines of wisdom upon the reverse 
side of their ill-woven systems. The liberty which they 
found upon the soil of America, awakened no giddy and 
tumultuous raptures, because it differed only in degree 
from that which they had known at home. They brought 
with them the habit of civil obedience and the instinct of 
political constructiveness. Persecution had stamped more 
deeply upon their hearts the noble principles expressed 
in the homely Latin of Magna Charta. They had sat 
upon juries ; they had seen the judicial and executive 
functions of a state embodied in the justice of the peace 
and the constable. They knew the meaning of those 
proud words, the Commons of England. The very op- 
pressions which they had suffered, had been under the 



17 

forms of law. They brought with them whatever was 
vital and progressive in the institutions of England, and 
nothing of that which was obsolete and unsuited to their 
new sphere of action and duty. They left behind them 
the burdens of feudalism, the prerogatives of the crown, 
the privileges of the nobility, the laws of entail, the right 
of primogeniture, and the civil grasp of ecclesiastical tri- 
bunals. In the race that was set before them, they 
started without weight. They found here, cast into their 
laps, and without a struggle, more than their brethren in 
England could win after two i-evolutions. 

The principles of civil liberty and religious faith which 
the Pilgrims, as Englishmen and as Puritans, brought 
with them, were the germs of those institutions which 
have made the New England States so respectable and 
so happy a community, and had so large an influence, 
direct and indirect, upon the whole land. We have no 
reason to suppose that the Pilgrims themselves were at 
all conscious of the splendid procession of events that was 
to start from the Rock of Plymouth. They had no other 
object than to seek a safe asylum in a remote land, where 
they might worship God in peace, according to the dic- 
tates of their own conscience ; and in His hands they sub - 
missively left the issue of their work. It seems to me 
that the enterprise itself wears a more natural dignity, 
and that the character of the Pilgrims becomes more 
simple and noble, if we accept their own statement of 
their motives and expectations as the plain truth, and do 
not seek to garnish it with modern inventions. The phi- 
losophy of history, so called, is apt to slide into mere 

9 



18 

speculation, and a succession of events, lying at a dis- 
tance of two centuries, is sometimes seen to be linked 
together by a law of sequence which exists only in the 
observer's own mind. As the stars are grouped into con- 
stellations from dim resemblances which they suggest, so 
the bright points in history are made to assume shape 
and consistency, in obedience to arbitrary analogies. Not 
unto the Pilgrims, admirable as they were, is the honor 
due, but unto God, who turned their weakness into 
strength, and their sufferings into glory; who, from be- 
ginnings which, to merely human judgment, seemed to pro- 
mise nothing but disaster and defeat, reared up a mighty 
people, whose future progress is beyond conjecture, as its 
past has been beyond parallel. 

With the growth and increase of the various settle- 
ments in New England, the development of the principle 
of democracy becomes more and more marked ; but we 
have no right to infer that the Pilgrims themselves, or 
their successors at Salem and Boston, ever imagined that 
it was their destiny to become the founders of great de- 
mocratic communities. The idea of the sovereignty of the 
people never presented itself to their minds ; and if it 
had, it would have been received with very little favor. 
But it is none the less true, that from the beginning, the 
inevitable current of events swept towards democratic 
institutions, and that, with the elements that were at 
work, none other were possible. The great doctrine of 
the Reformation — ^justification by faith alone — ^liad poli- 
tical as well as religious consequences. It changed the 
relations, not only between God and the soul, but between 



19 

the state and the individual. He who had attained to 
peace through the pangs of a new spiritual birth— whom 
God, from the beginning, by virtue of His eternal decrees, 
had chosen and redeemed — could not but apply a search- 
ing spirit of inquiry to any system of polity which made 
him, while on earth, a passive instrument or a powerless 
slave. The views of the Puritan settlers upon church 
government and discipline, led them in the same direc- 
tion. Congregationalism is the principle of democracy 
applied to the ecclesiastical state. When a body of men, 
gathered together under the name of a church, found 
themselves qualified for the duties of self-government, it 
was natural for them to feel that they were also compe- 
tent to the ta.sk of secular administration. Thus the 
town, or primitive political society, was of twin birth 
with the parish, or religious society. These tendencies, 
resulting from the religious opinions of the early settlers 
of Massachusetts, were strengthened by the fact that 
they were, with hardly an exception, drawn from the mid- 
dle classes, and met upon the footing of a common social 
equality. 

All these elements, however, might have been counter- 
acted, and the foundations of an aristocracy laid, had it 
not been for the cheapness and abundance of land — and 
land, too, of such moderate fertility that it could only be 
made valuable by intelligent labor. An aristocracy can 
never be formed except upon the basis of something like 
an exclusive right in the land, by which the community 
becomes divided into two classes, landlords and tenants. 
No such division ever took place in New England. The 



20 

early emigrations having been undertaken from religious 
motives, and not from considerations of gain, there was 
nothing to tempt those large capitalists who might have 
stipulated for manors and principalities as the condition 
of their becoming partners in the enterprise. 

Thus the religious opinions of the early settlers, the 
general level of social equality from which they had start- 
ed at home> and the abundance of land productive enough 
to reward labor, but not to invite capital, led to the de- 
velopment of institutions embodying the principle of self- 
government more fully than had been before known. An 
additional impulse was given to these tendencies by the 
early establishment of the system of free schools, in which 
provision was made for the education of every child, at 
the public expense. For the first time in the history of 
the world, the principle was laid down and carried out 
into operation, that the education of youth was the duty 
of the state, the expense of which was to be defrayed by 
a tax upon property, to which those who had no children 
were as much required to contribute, as those who had. 
Education was justly regarded as the right of all, and not 
the privilege of a few. In knowledge was recognized an 
element of protection in which all were interested, and 
for which all were bound to pay. 

The parish or religious society, the town, and the com- 
mon school, have been and are the characteristic institu- 
tions of New England. By them and through them, we 
are what we are, and have what we have. They were 
not exotics, transplanted from another clime ; but they 
were the spontaneous growth of the soil, and their roots 



21 

were twined round the fibres of tlie popular heart. They 
all wrought together for a common end. They fed the 
soul from the tree of life, and the mind from the tree of 
knowledge. They formed the instinct of social order, and 
practically trained men how to build themselves into a 
state. A town-meeting does not usually awaken much 
of reflection or emotion in those who attend or observe 
it, but it is a most pregnant and suggestive spectacle. 
It is the primitive political monad, entire within itself, 
competent to complete its own appointed work, and at 
the same time furnishing the deep and broad foundation 
on which the more comprehensive functions of the state 
repose. The readiness with which men at these meet- 
ings form themselves into an organized body, the facil- 
ity with which they dispatch business, the tact with 
which they discern the limits of their powers, and the 
respect which they show to the letter of the warrant 
which summons them, are supposed by us to be matters 
of course, belonging to man as man. But they are the 
precious legacy bequeathed to us by the toils and suffer- 
ings of our fathers. They are the transmitted instincts 
of regulated liberty. By them is the citizen distinguished 
from the subject. In these faculties and facilities the 
security of our institutions resides. They keep us in that 
state of stable equilibrium which renders a revolution 
impossible. The essential principle of the civil polity of 
New England is, that there shall be the maximum of ad- 
ministration and the minimum of government. Nothing 
shall be done by the town which can be done by the 
school district ; nothing by the county which can be done 



22 

by the town ; nothing by the state which can be done by 
the county. Power is to be kept as much as possible in 
the hands of those most exposed to suffer from its abuses. 
The conservative element is sought, not in the limitation 
of political rights, but in the multiplication of political 
trusts. 

In the history of our country, the two principles of re- 
ligious faith and civil liberty, have been in harmonious 
co-operation, and not in mutual contrariety. Religion 
and its ministers have not been the enemies of progress ; 
nor has there been that fatal alliance between liberty and 
irreligion, so often seen upon the Continent of Europe ; 
nor have the frantic steps of revolution been marshaled 
by torches lighted at the fire-brands of hell. The pro- 
gress and prosperity of the country are the result of the 
mutual action and reaction of these two principles. The 
religious faith which was so powerful as a sustaining and 
hope-inspiring presence to our fathers, in their days of 
sorrow and of small things, is not less important as an 
elevating and restraining element in the maddening whirl 
of success. As has been truly remarked by Coleridge, 
" the two antagonist powers, or opposite interests of the 
state, under which all other state interests are comprised, 
are those of permanence and of progression." The highest 
problem of political wisdom is to blend these two powers 
in harmonious and concurring equilibrium. In the torch- 
races of antiquity, not only those lost the prize who failed 
to reach the goal before their competitors, but those also 
who ran so heedlessly that the light which they carried 
was extinguished. So it is with nations to whom the fire 



of liberty is intrusted ; they must guard the flame while 
they run the race. There is an analogy between the per- 
fect man and the perfect state. The perfect man is not a 
man without passions, for that would be an impossible 
monster, but a man in Avhom reason and conscience are 
guiding principles, but the passions simply propelling im- 
pulses, never supplying their own end and object. So, a 
perfect state is that in which the reason and conscience 
of the community, speaking by the voice of law, control 
the passions working in their appointed sphere of ma- 
terial development. In England, the only country in 
Europe which affords anything like a parallel to our own, 
the element of permanence is sought in the landed inter- 
est, the House of Lords being, in theory, and to a con- 
siderable extent in fact, an assemblage of the great landed 
estates of the realm. Our institutions give to us the 
largest measure of the element of progression, because 
each individual feels himself to be a part of the state, and 
pours out the rapid currents of his own heart, to swell 
the tide on which the nation is born. The spirit of the 
living creature is in the wheels of time. But where is 
the power of permanence to come from ? It is supplied in 
some measure by the upper branch of our legislatures, 
which is supposed to reflect the deliberative wisdom of 
the country more distinctly than the popular body ; but 
as they both rest upon the basis of universal suffrage, 
the protection thus afforded is rather formal than sub- 
stantial. The antagonistic power which wo need, cannot 
be found in political combinations and mechanical con- 
trivances, since all are set in motion by the same popular 



24 

will, but it must reside in the popular conscience. The 
people must be their own law as well as their own im- 
pulse. A perception of right and wrong, founded upon 
distinctions running deep into the spiritual nature of man, 
must be a controlling element in politics. The elective 
franchise must be held to be a trust as well as a right. 
A godless democracy, in which the passions of men move 
to their wild work through the forms of law, happily for 
mankind, contains within itself the pledge of self-de- 
struction. Who can stand before a vindictive, rapacious, 
unprincipled majority'? Those principles and motives 
Avhicli shed so pure a light around the narrow cabin of the 
Mayflower, which gave such worth and dignity to the me- 
morable compact there drawn up and signed, must wait upon 
our steps, as we move along the giddy and perilous edges 
of power and wealth. That Rock of Ages, which was a 
shelter to our fathers in the piercing storm of trial, must 
spread for us its healing shadow, in the feverish blaze of 
prosperity. Robinson, in his letter of advice to his peo- 
ple, tells them to honor their rulers, " not beholding in 
them the ordinariness of their persons, but God's ordi- 
nance for your good." Noble, significant, enduring 
words ! The state is God's ordinance for man's good, 
and there is no higher law than that which bids men dis- 
pose themselves into " the unity and married calm of 
states." If the allegiance of the citizen be made to rest 
upon any lower basis, the state is degraded to the level 
of a copartnership or a corporation. What light is to the 
eye, what sound is to the ear, law is to the unperverted 
reason. It is the voice of God in the soul of man. 



25 

The unexampled growth of our country in population 
and wealth, and the power which, for good or for evil, is 
put into our hands, make it all-important that our men- 
tal and moral cultivation should keep pace with our* 
material civilization. Many lights of hope and promise 
are shining upon the path that lies before us, and we 
ma,y look forward to the future with cheerful trust. 
But I cannot but think that there has manifested itself, 
of late years, in various parts of the country, a growing 
impatience of law, which certainly bodes no good. Law 
is too often written and spoken of, as if it were the 
arbitrary decree of some superior and irresponsible power, 
and not the national reason and conscience, prescribing 
rules of conduct to the national will. The same feeling 
shows itself in a morbid sympathy with crime, summon- 
ing the generous impulses of humanity on behalf of him 
who has broken the law, and setting its face against 
justice, as a tyrant and an oppressor. It inflames and 
alarms the popular mind, by denunciations of imaginary 
plots and impossible conspiracies against their liberties ; 
it encourages the wolves and polecats of the press, in 
their foul assaults upon the peace and good name of men 
and women ; it directs the currents of popular prejudice 
and popular passion against the judiciary, and would fain 
paralyze the arm of justice, so that it may neither smite 
the guilty nor protect the innocent. Restraints imposed 
by religion ; restraints imposed by law, international or 
municipal ; restraints imposed by reason of youth, and 
restraints imposed by reason of sex, are all felt to be 
evils. The largest amount of liberty is deemed to be, 



26 

under all conditions, the greatest good, forgetting that 
"everything that tends to emancipate us from external re- 
straint, without adding to our own power of self-govern- 
ment, is mischievous,"* and that if liberty with law be 
the fire on the hearth, liberty without laAV is the fire on 
the floor. Far be it from me to say that this is a gene- 
ral tendency, or that the good sense of the country is 
not a greatly preponderating element ; but I must appeal 
to the observation of such of my audience as have reached 
or passed the middle period of life, if the evil be not 
one which has increased, is increasing, and ought to be 
diminished ? The heat of party spirit warps the mirror 
of the mind, so that it returns no true image, and the dis- 
turbing force of a near irritation unsettles the habitual 
movements of the reason; but it is hard to believe that a 
reflecting man, in his sober senses, can entertain the 
notion that any danger is to be apprehended, in our coun- 
try, from the excess or oppression of law. Our perils lie 
not that way. It is more likely that the explosive force 
of the principle of liberty will shatter the vessels which 
contain it, than that the vessels by their solidity and 
compression will prevent the due expansion of the princi- 
ple itself. If there be any descendant of the Pilgrims 
who gives his hand in aid of popular violence, directed 
against the law, whether it be to destroy an abolition 
press, to rescue a fugitive slave from the hands of jus- 
tice, or to commit an assault upon the person and pro 
perty of the representative of a foreign power, he dishonors 
the blood which flows in his veins. He has read their 
♦ Goethe. 



27 

lives and their writings in a spirit as perverse as that in 
■which they read the word of God, when they found in 
it a warrant for selling the wife and son of Philip into 
slavery. 

The study of history rebukes the pride of human rea- 
son, by revealing marked disproportions between particu- 
lar events and the consequences to which they lead. 
The first forty years of the seventeenth century were fruit- 
ful in striking occurrences and remarkable men. Charles 
II. was born in 1630. When he had reached an age to un- 
derstand the rudiments of historical knowledge, we may 
imagine his royal father to have commissioned some grave 
and experienced counselor of his court to instruct the fu- 
ture monarch of England in the great events which had 
taken place in Europe, since the opening of the century. 
Upon what themes would the tutor of the young prince 
have been likely to discourse '? He would have dwelt upon 
the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands j and 
upon the Thirty Years' War in Germany, in which the 
fortunes of a daughter of the House of Stuart were so in- 
volved. He would have quoted the spirited speech of 
the English princess, that she would rather eat dry bread 
as the wife of a king, than live in luxury as the wife of 
an elector — and would have recalled the sorrow that fell 
upon the heart of England when the news came of the 
disastrous battle of Prague. He would have painted the 
horror and dismay which ran through France at the as- 
sassination of Henry the Fourth. He would have traced 
the glorious career of Gustavus Adolphus, step by step, 
and lingered long upon the incidents of liis last fight — 



28 

hoAV the king went into battle singing a hymn of Luther's ; 
how the deep-voiced chorus rolled along the files of his 
army, and with what rage and grief the Swedes fell upon 
the foe when they saw the riderless horse of their beloved 
leader rush madly through their ranks. He would have 
attempted to convey to his young pupil some notion of 
the military genius of Maurice of Nassau, of the vast po- 
litical capacity of Cardinal Richelieu, and of the splendor 
and mystery that wrapped the romantic life of Wallen- 
stein. But so seemingly insignificant an occurrence as 
the sailing of a few Puritans from Delpli Haven, in 
the summer of 1620, would doubtless have been en- 
tirely overlooked ; or, if mentioned at all, the young 
prince might have been told^ that in that year a con- 
gregation of fanatical Brownists, who had previously 
left England for Holland, sailed for North Virginia ; and 
that;, since that time, many others of the same factious and 
troublesome sect had followed in their path, and that 
their project of emigration had so far succeeded, as to en- 
able them to send home many cargoes of fish and peltry. 
But with our eyes, we can see that the humble event was 
the seed of far more memorable consequences than all 
the sieges, battles, and treaties of that momentous period. 
The efiects of those fields of slaughter hardly lasted 
longer than the smoke and dust of the contending armies ; 
but the seminal principles which were carried to America 
in the Mayflower, which grew in the wholesome air of 
obscurity and neglect, are at this moment vital forces in 
the movements of the world, the extent and influence of 
which no political foresight can measure. Ideas which. 



29 

for the first time in the history of mankind, took shape 
upon our soil, are the springs of that contest now going 
on in Europe between the Past and the Future, the end of 
which no man can see. May God inspire us and our rul- 
ers with the wisdom to preserve and transmit, unimpaired, 
those advantages secured to us by our remote position, 
and by the fact that we started without the weary bur- 
dens and perplexing entanglements of the Past. May 
no insane spirit of propagandism lead us to take part in 
alien contests. May we throw into the scale of strug- 
gling freedom, iiot the sword of physical force, but the 
weight of a noble example — the moral argument of a 
great people, invigorated but not intoxicated by their lib- 
erty — a poAver which, though unsubstantial, will yet, like 
the uplifted hands of Moses upon Horeb, avail more 
than hosts of armed men. 

We have met here to-day, drawn together by the sen- 
timent of antiquity ; but what a span is the life of New 
England, compared with the life of the world ? There 
are persons now living, who have conversed with a vener- 
able man, who remembered to have seen Peregrine White, 
who was born on board the Mayflower. By a fact like 
this we seem to be brought near to the event which we 
are commemorating. But if antiquity be measured, not 
by the lapse of dead years, but by the beatings of the 
heart of national life, we have a right to feel and to ex- 
press the sentiment. The relation of time exists only in 
the mind. Thirty generations of the hybernating sleep 
of China, are not longer than two crowded centuries of 



30 

energetic Nevr England. * We take pride in the material 
prosperity of our country, and we have a right to do so ; 
but on this occasion let that feeling be tempered with a 
softer and gentler sentiment. Let the remembrance of 
the past solemnize the joy of the present. Let the 
thoughts awakened by the sufferings and sacrifices of our 
fathers, take the shape of gratitude for our blessings and 
submission in our trials. As you return to your com. 
fortable homes, and greet the smiling faces of your chil- 
dren around your well-spread boards, let your hearts be 
stirred with a fresh sense of thankfulness, when you think 
of the piercing winds that chilled the Pilgrims, and of 
the huiiger that wasted their strength. You have read 
of the sufferings of their first winter — how, under the 
exposures and privations of their new mode of life, one 
after another sickened and died, so that when the spring 
came, one-half of their whole number had been gathered 
to their last sleep. If separation from those we love be 
bard to us, living in ease and comfort, walled about with 
security, with such fullness of life around us, what must 
it have been to them, that handful of men and women, 
set upon the edge of a wilderness dark with unnumbered 
apprehensions, when the removal of each face was a sen- 
sible diminution of their common stock of cheerfulness 
and hope ! Would that the last moments of those thus 
early called could have been soothed with a foreknowledge 
of the great works that were to follow them ! Would 
that the dim eyes of the dying Carver had been permitted 

* " Better fifty yearg of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." — Ten- 
nyson. 



31 

to see the things which we now see ! Would not so mag- 
nificent an apocalypse have awakened a glow of rapture 
and exultation, not fading away even before the glories 
of the Beatific Vision ! And if it be permitted to those 
who have passed into the skies, to recall the life of earth, — 
if there be sensitive links of memory vibrating between 
time and eternity — may we not feel an assurance that 
our fathers are with us, in spirit, at this hour, and that 
throbs of mortal joy are mingling with the deep peace of 
those serene abodes ? 

Men of New England ! Sons of the Pilgrims ! Let 
not the fleet angel of this hour leave us without a bless- 
ing. If the memories of this day have softened and melt- 
ed your hearts, stamp upon them, before they grow cold, 
some image of ancestral worth. Rich are the benedic- 
tions which have fallen upon our heads from these cover- 
ing heavens. With us, the God of our fathers has no 
controversy. He does not try our faith by making noble 
efforts fruitless, and heroic sacrifices imavailing. He has 
set no perplexing chasms in our path, between the pur- 
pose and the work. With us, well-doing is happiness, 
and duty is another name for prosperity. Great is the 
debt we owe to the Past ; great is the trust committed to 
us for the Future. We can pay that debt — we can dis- 
charge that trust — only by working faithfully in the Pre- 
sent. The stately march of our laws and speech, which 
began at the rock of Plymouth, will ever move in the 
paths of honor and of peace, so long as it follows that 
great guiding light which led the Pilgrims into their land 
of promise. 



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